Bitfinex Launches Trading with Futures on SegWit2x Fork and Announces new Ticker Symbol
As the first exchange to addess SegWit2x, Bitfinex explained how it would deal with the upcoming hard fork; legacy Bitcoin will keep the ticker symbol BTC while the SegWit2x coin will get the symbol B2X. At the same time, Bitfinex launched the trading futures for the two bitcoins which might be a product of the fork.With SegWit2x a relevant group of Bitcoin companies plans to activate a 2MB hard fork at block 494,784. The companies agreed to pull through this fork in New York, which is why the agreement is known as the New York Agreement (NYA).The goal of the NYA was to overcome the stagnation in Bitcoin and to reunite the community. For this, the companies agreed to combine SegWit – demanded by “small blockers” – with a small increase in the base block size – demanded by “big blockers.” After SegWit was successfully activated on August 1, the second part is scheduled to happen after around 5500 blocks, which comes to about 38 days.Other than SegWit the increase of the block size limit requires a hard fork. Even if the NYA was able to get around 95 percent of the hash rate on board – which should enable a clean hard fork – there remains the threat of Bitcoin splitting in two chains. Since many on the team of Core developers have taken a position against SegWit2x, most expect such a chain split to happen.Most exchanges and Bitcoin companies are not happy with the situation. The hard fork will require them to make a tough decision; which coin is the real coin? It’s hard to say right now.Bitfinex, one of the major Bitcoin exchanges, made the first step to answering this question.
I believe that if S2X catches momentum while the legacy Bitcoin doesn't, and if other exchanges decides to use the BTC ticker on the S2X-chain, then it will be very hard for Bitfinex to follow up on their promise. In any case, such a promise places Bitfinex clearly in the landscape as loyal to the "Core movement".
The Bitfinex futures is a bit skewed, there are quite many conditions that would render one of the tokens worthless, and I can imagine that several of those hurts BT2 more than BT1.
The T&C was quite lengthy, and I think the most unacceptable part of the conditions is that Bitfinex can change the Terms and Conditions any time. If placing a bet, the conditions should be as simple as possible, as well-defined as possible, and certainly immutable! If betting between outcome A and outcome B, and the completely unexpected outcome C happens, then the bet should be cancelled. When knowing that the exchange is "Core-loyal", it makes the BT2-bet even more risky.
Despite all this, I did buy a little bit of the BT2 future - the possibility to grow 0.3 BTC into 1.6 BTC was quite tempting.
I would love to see some similar futures option from more exchanges, I think we'd see different pricing dependent on the exact wording of the T&C, as well as what stance the exchange has on the fork.